Vietnam the third: Day 7, Sapa
Folk art. No matter how cool or talented you think you are, you’re never going to be at the same level as an ancient lady in a house on a hillside surrounded by chickens and buffalo. Fortunately I know that I’m about as talented and artistically blessed as a Billy Joel concert, so a morning creating a batik design was never likely to produce a work that had any more than occasional moments of accidental competency.
Batik is a method of creating designs through first applying wax to cloth then dying, then removing the wax leaving the design where the wax was. It is recognised to have been first practiced in Indonesia, and has spread throughout South East Asia, including to Vietnam, where the Hmong have been practising this for several hundred years. Hmong batik incorporates intricate designs to symbolise the environment, plants, animals, that kind of stuff.
Previous readers will obviously have me pegged as one who is a natural when it comes to intricate designs and delicate handicrafts: I can work a set of chopsticks competently, pour a beer from a can into a glass, and extract crab meat from a claw, but that’s about it. When our instructor, a venerable woman, pulled out a hook implement that looked more like a nasty concealed weapon and started freehand marking dead straight lines in cloth on a wooden board, both with the grain and across it, all I could do was suck in my stomach and try not to make too much of a mess.
She lit a small fire in a metal trough that already had plenty of ash, and next to it tucked a bowl with a couple of different types of wax in it, in order to melt these and then keep the bowl warm. The batik tool was an ingenious construction: three thin sheets of copper hammered together in a flat hook design, tied to a thin wooden handle that could have otherwise worked as a prison shiv. The copper hook held enough wax for a few strokes, while the copper would also keep the wax warm enough to apply. This tool also worked best when used what to me seemed backwards, with the handle pointed away and the wax hook then drawn towards you.
Our instructor was great, managing to wrangle 3 children, 2 puppies, several cats, numerous chickens, 4 buffalo who kept wandering into the front yard because that’s where their stash of food was, as well as keeping two westerners safe from setting themselves on fire or scalding themselves with hot wax. L seemed to take to batik like a natural, and the designs she was given were quite intricate. The instructor spent very little time with L in comparison, she didn’t have to point out several times the correct way to hold the tool, nor the best place in the wax bowl to recharge the tool, nor pointing out the parts of the design that she’d missed.
From what I could tell, the designs that our instructor (sadly we didn’t get her name) had me batiking (is that a word, is batik the style, or the action?) seemed to symbolise spring and growth, small leaves, flowers or snails. After I’d managed to coat the cloth with an attempted design, I was shown the dying process: basically a big bucket of blue dye, where the cloth is left to infuse for 5 minutes, before draining for 5 minutes on the rack above it. Repeat 5 times.
We left before the dying was finished, back to Sapa, but will get the results delivered to our hotel tomorrow.
Today was also a laundry day, so we took our bags down to a nearby house where they charge 30k VND per kilo, so our 4kg of washing will be less than $8. The joys of this part of the world include never needing to pay hotel rates for laundry.
Lunch we took a wander down the main strip to A Quynh, a generally positively reviewed restaurant offering local foods. We came in at the end of lunchtime, so there were only two other tables occupied, one was a large and loud Vietnamese family, the other were a quieter group, Vietnamese but not locals. The menu looked good but pricey, containing various local specialties including black chicken. Service was a little slow, after looking around aimlessly for someone to take our order for 5 minutes, the quiet table noticed and eventually managed to call someone over. The food was excellent, black chicken is pretty much that, not a plump western lard arse but a gamey, slightly chewy, flavourful free range athlete of a bird that tastes wonderful with ginger. Excellent food, a little pricey, and hopefully the service will pick up once more tourists come back.
Otherwise a fairly lazy afternoon, today was probably the best weather we’ve had in Sapa, so there were moments of sunshine, and at times we could see at least part of the mountains across the valley. It was nice to sit out on our balcony an see the terraces and trees (or indeed anything more than 20 metres away).
Dinner was down the street from out hotel, at Viet Home Restaurant. They serve a mix of local and French-inspired dishes, but we went local with Sapa greens and shrimp with Sapa mushrooms. Both were incredibly tasty, they grow some excellent mushrooms around here that went well with the medium sized prawns, while the greens were plentiful and done in butter and garlic.
Then it was back to the hotel, as we’re both feeling a bit tired from both having to concentrate for several hours, hunched over on a small stool trying to replicate intricate designs, and also from a little bit of sleeping poorly — last night’s revellers found a bit of second wind around 1am, and we’ve been waking early, either from the light creeping in, or our biological clocks, or a mix of both.
I forgot to talk about the room’s toilet yesterday. Our feelings about this hotel are mixed: some staff are great, others less so; the decor is dated; the bathroom is a bit run-down; the safe doesn’t open; and it’s not as no smoking as we probably thought it would be. While the decor is quite dated, the toilet is one of those Japanese-style devices read about more than experienced: the seat has 3 temperature settings; the bowl has a bright blue light when the lid is opened; there’s a massage function in the seat; it will shoot water up your butt at 3 different velocities (I think the water temperature can also be adjusted); and there’s also a drying function that I imagine shoots hot air at your butt. All of this at the touch of a button. It’s unusual to say the least.
Tomorrow is climbing Mt Fansipan, well I say climbing but it appears to be a few steps between a train, then cable car, then funicular. But at over 3,100 metres, it’s higher than any mountain in Australia. L also wants to check out the swanky cafe in the behemoth, which is only fair as she’s not a heights person so if going to need something after the cable car.